Rolling Stone : The Notorious Bettie Page : Review

-- Bettie Page, a fetish goddess in black leather and bangs, was the perv pinup of choice back in the Eisenhower era. Any old sleaze could turn Bettie's life into a kinky S&M wallow, a cinematic stroke book. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that director Mary Harron, who co-wrote the scrappy script with Guinevere Turner, doesn't do the expected. She's too sly for that, too subversively funny. Her version of American Psycho in 2000, following her acclaimed 1996 debut with I Shot Andy Warhol, dodged the gore to take an ax to male vanity and greed. Her timeless theme here is the gap between real women and male sexual fantasies. Bettie, a sweet-natured girl from Nashville armed with her belief in God and the natural glory of her own body, giggled at the men who liked to see her model and pose with whips and chains. The dirt never touched her. She wouldn't let it. --